Plough Book Sales

"Power Pioneers, The Art of the Engine, Pre 1956". Volume 1 covers the years from the first combustion engines up to and including 1955.

The Art of the Engine’s mandate is to bring some of the lesser known alternative prime movers that have been hidden from the masses into plain view. This site is not about how well different arrangements work or even if they work at all, it’s about heat engine divergent ideas and their concepts. As both material and manufacturing processes improve, ideas that wouldn’t work previously become more viable with improved metallurgy and technologies or even just fresh thinking.

This book uses the convention that all heat engines will fit into one or more of five basic classes which I define as:

Axial - have cylinders that are usually parallel to the output shaft. The most common type in this class are revolver types in which the cylinders are arranged around the output shaft like a revolver type of pistol. Cylinders are either opposed piston or opposed cylinder configurations and sometimes the block rotates about a fixed output shaft or the cylinder block is stationary and the output shaft rotates.

Inline - usually have the cylinders at an angle to the output shaft. This angle is usually 90 degrees for convention engines but there are variants that are 180 degrees. Included in this grouping are "V", "W", "U", "E", box, and similar configurations

Opposed - have either cylinders or pistons that are mated or mirrored against each other. The two major sub classes are either opposed piston in which the space between the pistons is the combustion chamber while opposed cylinder engines have separate combustion chambers. One of the major benefits of the opposed piston configuration is the reduce heat loss from non working surfaces.

Radial - have cylinders that radiate out from the center of rotation. These cylinders can also be of the opposed piston configuration at the expense of the crankshaft configuration complexities.

Rotary - have their cylinder block or its piston(s), which are sometimes commonly called a roton or a rotor, rotating concentrically or eccentrically around the output shafts' center of rotation.